Digital Activism among Dalit-Bahujan Communities in India : Anti-Caste Discourses in Relations and Conflict

MENŠÍKOVÁ, Tereza. Digital Activism among Dalit-Bahujan Communities in India : Anti-Caste Discourses in Relations and Conflict. In The 9th annual Global Digital Humanities Symposium (Michigan, US). 2024.

Basic information

• Original name: Digital Activism among Dalit-Bahujan Communities in India : Anti-Caste Discourses in Relations and Conflict
• Authors: MENŠÍKOVÁ, Tereza.
• Edition: The 9th annual Global Digital Humanities Symposium (Michigan, US), 2024.

Other information

• Original language: English
• Type of outcome: Presentations at conferences
• Field of Study: 60304 Religious studies
• Country of publisher: United States of America
• Confidentiality degree: is not subject to a state or trade secret
• WWW: URL
• Organization unit: Faculty of Arts
• Keywords (in Czech): dalité; online média; kasty; náboženství; komputační textová analýza; sémantické sítě
• Keywords in English: Dalits; online media; castes; religion; computational text analysis; semantic networks
• Tags: International impact

Abstract

The rise of social media greatly affected marginalized communities and social movements which struggle against discrimination and freedom of speech suppression. Access to digital technologies has enabled a new type of connection that would surpass the geographical, social, and cultural barriers among different communities in societies. Among those whose activism has been affected by globalization and access to the internet are also Dalit-Bahujan communities in India. Their socio-political activism emerged as a reaction to hundreds of years of caste inequality and discrimination in social, political, economic, and religious interactions. Drawing on the legacies of Jyotirao Phule, B. R. Ambedkar or Kanshi Ram, their strategies (though often very diverse) are primarily aimed at creating change in Indian society, and digital media is viewed as one of the means to achieve it. In my paper, I focus on using digital technologies by activists coming mostly from Dalit-Bahujan and Ambedkarite Buddhist communities in India to explore the role of religion and Buddhism in their anti-caste discourse. The research is centred on analyzing data in the form of textual materials published on the major Dalit-Bahujan informational and news platform based in English – Round Table India: For an Informed Ambedkar Age. The corpus of online data consists of public textual contributions from 2010 to 2023 (around 3000 documents with metadata). Through computational text analysis methods such as word co-occurrence, word collocations, and LDA topic modelling, I have analyzed the major anti-caste discourses and modelled the use of religion and Buddhism in activist writings. The paper seeks to not only present the possibilities of using computational methods in the textual production of marginalized communities but also address the possible problematic aspects that research of their digital activism brings with it.